Since the first Mennonites arrived in America from Germany in 1683, the denomination has gone through many schisms, often over issues of tradition and modernity. At one time, it was buttons vs. eyehooks on blouses, and whether women should have to wear bonnets; more recently, it’s been women’s leadership in the church and acceptance of those who identify as LGBTQ. Each time a split happens, a new version of the faith is created, while an older version is preserved as if in amber—even now, many people associate Mennonites with anachronisms like horses and buggies, when in reality, this kind of traditional lifestyle is only followed by roughly 13,000 American adults, called Old-Order Mennonites. (People often confuse Mennonites with the Amish, too; although both groups are part of the Anabaptist tradition, meaning that they baptize believers as adults rather than infants, Mennonites were historically followers of Menno Simons, a 16th-century preacher.) [...]
Since 2005, nine churches in the Allegheny Conference have made the choice to walk away—mostly over the issue of women’s leadership in the conference. Currently, the conference is led by a woman, Donna Mast, and many of the churches that left over this issue did so before she became the leading minister. “Do I take it personally? No I don’t,” she told me. “I grew up with the understanding that women should not be in pastoral leadership positions. I ran from the call that I was sensing from God. I ran as hard as I could, until the day when I decided that it was more difficult to be ostracized from God than to follow God into areas where I didn’t understand where God was leading.” [...]
Mennonite Church USA, has seen declining membership over the past half decade—a drop of roughly 16,000 adult members and 45 congregations, or 15 percent of its members. This doesn’t necessarily reveal what’s going on in the denomination as a whole. According to 2010 research by Donald Kraybill, a professor at Elizabethtown College, American Mennonites belong to roughly 60 different organizing bodies, and some of the more traditional groups are growing rapidly because of their high birth rates. [...]
“Sometimes I think those Lancaster Conference bishops had it right in the 1920s and 30s when they said no radios—nobody’s allowed to listen to the radio, because you’re going to get influenced by worldly music,” Lapp said. “Our congregation is quite traditional in our worship: We sing out of hymnals, we have an order of worship, and yet we’re seen as progressive theologically. I think that is actually true in many areas of the Mennonite church: The folks who have progressive theology are holding onto the tradition in terms of worship, wanting to get back to what it means to be Anabaptist.”
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